Inside the conference that exploded a legal bombshell about the Union

The National

26-05-2025

The conference, which took place last weekend, had been planned for more than six months.
The Dunfermline Carnegie Conference Centre was a fitting venue as Dunfermline of course served as the de facto capital of Scotland between the 11th and 15th centuries.
We had a couple of disappointments when people's diaries didn't line up and even briefly considered cancelling. However, fortunately we didn't cancel and those who missed it can find it on the SSRG TV YouTube channel.
As a non-partisan think tank, the SSRG holds weekly meetings and invites many experts to them, both from academia and current and past elected politicians.
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We seek to address and research the big questions that any new sovereign state needs answered.
The most recent publication by the SSRG was on Scotland in Europe, We found that joining Efta and the EEA was the preferable option for Scotland rather than trying to rejoin the EU, especially as Scotland would need to have control over its own currency before applying to rejoin the EU.
This is but one major issue political parties must consider before announcing they want to rejoin the EU without carefully weighing the options.
So what did people learn while at the SSRG conference? On the Friday there was a panel on social security and pensions which included Tommy Sheridan, Alba Party deputy leader Neale Hanvey, and Jim Osborne.
We learned that the UK pension is a Ponzi scheme and that National Insurance is being paid by today's workers to pay today's pensioners and nothing had been invested.
This is completely different from the likes of Norway which has a sovereign wealth fund, officially the Government Pension Fund Global. It had a value of around $1.738 trillion as of March this year. The UK has no sovereign wealth fund.
A session on what happens on the day after independence saw Jim Sillars and constitutional expert Dr Elliot Bulmer discuss how Scotland will need to negotiate with England on a future trade agreement and the division of assets and liabilities.
There was some passionate debate from delegates and this creative dialectic only served to enhance the effect of the conference.
Of course, it wasn't all about the big questions. There were a couple of lighter sessions including a Scottish Questions and a Meet the Authors which allowed for more general subjects to be aired.
Saturday kicked off with a session on energy policy which included panellists that actually worked in and have experience in the energy sector. It was hosted by the SSRG's Mark McNaught, while Phil Boswell and Rhys Stanwix took questions from delegates. Everyone left the session wiser than before on energy policy.
However, the big event saw a panel of legal and constitutional experts one by one started to dismantle the prevailing legal narrative that Scotland was in and had joined a Union with England in the 1706 Treaty and the 1707 Acts of Union.
Professor Alf Baird presented how Scotland was living in a colonial mindset reinforced by British-ness in the media or, as I would call it, the BBC. Craig Murray talked about how Scotland must take its sovereignty back.
Sharof Azizov, a lawyer from Justice Pour Tous Internationale in Geneva, talked about how he would be taking Scotland's claim to the UN C24 committee for Scotland to be listed for decolonisation.
Then evidence was expertly presented by Professor Robert Black KC, who demonstrated that no legal Union was ever created –England continued as before while Scotland was extinguished. The word 'extinguished' became a running joke as I had accidentally used the word to describe the panel instead of 'distinguished'. Ah the joy of live TV.
The legal ramifications of what was revealed over the fictitious nature of the Union cannot be overstated. Every treaty the UK has signed in the last 300 years is based on a legal fiction. This is truly a legal bombshell that exploded on to the world stage during our conference.
So where does this leave the political parties and the elected politicians? Few of them have taken the time to even question the validity of the British state, yet here we have expert legal opinion based on verifiable documented evidence that the UK is a legal fiction and Scotland is a Non-Self-Governing-Territory (NSGT).
By the time you read this the number of people who have viewed this historic session will have reached over 10,000 and none of this could have happened without Sara Salyers, who co-founded Liberation Scotland.
The 18,000-plus strong membership group, has for the last few years been navigating the many corridors of the National Archives, historical documents and several dead ends until the full picture could be made clear.
After the live transmission on YouTube, Christophe Dorige-Thomson, who had been watching in Jakarta, tweeted to the SSRG that a Scottish woman, called Muriel Stuart Walker, aka K'tut Tantri, attended the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia.
She supported its decolonisation through the UN C24 process and pushed the issue across media interviews. This led to Indonesia being the first nation to be decolonised under this process, which led to other nations following it. So my question is, is Sara Salyers the 21st-century Muriel Stuart Walker? I do hope so.